Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria, Wellington. Vol. 22, No. 9. Thursday, August 13, 1959
The Night-School Bogey
The Night-School Bogey
Let us try to get the "night-school" problem into focus. A breakdown by faculties of the 1958 students' roll is printed below:
Part-Time | Full-Time | |
---|---|---|
Law Faculty | 205 | 115 |
Commerce Faculty | 560 | 37 |
Arts Faculty | 742 | 362 |
Science Faculty | 192 | 378 |
Others | 51 | 37 |
Totals | 1,750 | 929 |
As long as we have a Law School and a Commerce Faculty at Victoria we will have a "night school." This is obvious. What is surprising is that the number of part-timers in the Arts Faculty is as great as that in the first two combined. Here, you would say, is where the pruning could be done.
Not Simple
But this is seen to be less simple than it looks. What about the Training College Students getting extra qualifications? What about people who have taken jobs because employers have been prepared to take them with incomplete degrees?
One thing is certain. No one has attempted to find, out general classifications into which part-time students fall.
No one seems to be able to tell us just how many real no-hopers there are among the part-timers. And most definitely no one can justify a purge of part-timers till he can prove a large number of them to be feckless in their aims and in their work. And this is a great deal to say of anybody, let alone a group of students in search of higher education.
—J.O.G.